There are several reasons why John McCain failed to secure the US Presidency on Tuesday night, and not all of them are relevant to British politics. For instance, McCain found himself the candidate immediately succeeding the worst American President since the Civil War, which was always going to be a hard sell. Furthermore, McCain was probably too old for the job and certainly looked it; what a disaster for America and the world that he did not manage to win the nomination in 2000, when he was in his prime. These issues were specific to the American contest.

But there are at least two important lessons that we can take from the contest, where the analogies with British politics are strong enough to count. First of all, McCain had based his long career on straight talk, and not pandering to the more swivel-eyed of the Republican base; he was prepared, when necessary, to run against his party when he believed it was in the wrong and out of touch with the American people. This was his selling point, and what a marvellously independent thinker he was. But Candidate McCain ditched the long-term strategy, and tried to energise the base 2004-style, thereby undoing all Senator McCain’s hard work. The Senator railed against Bush’s ‘unaffordable’ tax cuts, while the Candidate promised to make them permanent, and even to extend them. The Senator maintained a lofty and wholly laudable indifference to America’s puerile and toxic culture wars, while the Candidate worried about gay marriage and abortion. The Senator was concerned about climate change, while the Candidate offered a gas tax holiday. The Senator, buoyed by years of experience, criticised the cronyism of Washington where people were often selected for reasons of ideological soundness rather than ability; the Candidate put the manifestly inadequate Sarah Palin (who managed to make Dan Quayle look like Jack Kennedy) onto the slate. And Palin was much closer to Candidate McCain than the Senator.

Lesson 1 therefore is highly relevant to David Cameron; if your strategy has been a message of change, then there is no route back from that. Even if things are not going well on the vegetarian diet, throwing scraps of red meat to party activists would be a colossal error.

The second lesson comes from McCain’s less-than-nimble response to the financial crisis. Its recent phase, stemming more or less from the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September, has shifted the focus of politics completely, and frankly, Obama coped better than McCain, largely by keeping shtum. In the UK, the Tories have not responded brilliantly to the crisis either, and need to thrash out some positive messages and analysis to support their criticisms of the government (which have at least begun to register). Obama’s best move was to consult top-notch experts, and Cameron and co need to be seen to be using their best financial brains in similar fashion; maybe it is time for a prominent role for John Redwood.

The difficulty, of course, would be to arrange matters so that the inclusion of Redwood into the Cameroonian circle, learning lesson 2, did not appear to be a reversion to a rejected Tory past, contradicting lesson 1. Tricky, but not insuperable – Redwood, thank goodness, is no Sarah Palin – but it would require, at a minimum, Redwood to buy into the Cameroonian view of recent Conservative Party history.